Chapter 3
Consistent

If you are not consistent, you will lose the trust your team has in you. When you lose trust, you lose the locker room.

Consistency Wins the Locker Room

Mike Smith

I see it all too often. Coaches will begin the season with one philosophy and attitude, only to change their approach and attitude when the team starts to lose. As a leader you must be consistent in your leadership style, approach, attitude, philosophy, and tactics. If you start off being supportive and friendly with players, you can't go from being a players' coach to someone everyone hates. You can't go from encouraging to condescending. If you are not consistent throughout the year you will lose your team's trust, and as soon as that happens, you lose the locker room and in turn lose games. Please know this doesn't mean you won't have moments of anger or frustration. We all do. If you are a coach with high expectations who yells at times, your team will know that's your style and they will expect that from you. The key is to be who you are and coach the way you do all year long no matter what your win–loss record is. Your team must know what to expect from you. They must see that you stick to your principles and philosophy through adversity and challenges. You must be the same coach at 0-8 as you are 8-0. It's hard to do, especially when you are losing and the pressure mounts, but if you don't, then you are doomed for failure. The character you possess during the drought is what your team will remember during the harvest.

Consistency Wins in the Long Run

Jon Gordon

A good friend of mine, Tom Flick, played quarterback for Joe Gibbs and the Washington Redskins. Most people don't remember that the Redskins were really bad when Joe took over the team, and they started the season 0-5 Joe's first year as head coach. Tom told me that when they lost their fifth game, the guys thought Joe was going to let them have it in the locker room after the game. They all gathered as coach prepared to address the team. The guys expected a tirade but Joe Gibbs said, “Men, we are getting closer.” He encouraged them and focused on the process just as he had done all training camp and all season long. He was consistent and guided the Redskins to an 8-8 record that year and ultimately to three Super Bowls.

Examples like Joe Gibbs are great but the fact is being consistent isn't easy. Challenging situations, daily stress, and distractions can knock us off track. It's easy to lose our way. As a leader I want to encourage you to heed the advice of Pete Carroll, who when asked by my friend Rod Olson to describe his greatest challenge said, “My greatest challenge right now is to be consistent myself. I must be the ‘same guy’ all the time. I must be relentless in my pursuit of being consistent. I must discipline myself to be fully present so I can be in the moment with each person or player. Then we have a chance to maximize the moment together. My challenge is to be so consistent and optimistic, that every person in the organization feels that tomorrow will be better than today and we expect it to be.”

It's Not Okay to Be Moody

Jon Gordon

It's not just the coaches who must be consistent, but each team member as well. One time I was visiting a college women's basketball team and they told me how they would often have to send one of the players home because she was in a bad mood and negatively affected the team. I asked if they had to do this with other players and they said there were several who were sent home occasionally. I then asked if these players were always in a bad mood. The coaches told me that they were positive sometimes and negative sometimes. Their moods fluctuated. They never knew what to expect and neither did their teammates. When I spoke to the team that day I told them that it was important for them to be consistent. I challenged them to be positively contagious. I told them point blank that's it's not okay to be moody. When you are moody, people around you don't know what to expect from you and this causes them to lose trust in you. I told them that no matter what is going on with school or your personal life, when you walk into the locker room you have to decide to impact your teammates in a positive way. To build a winning team, you want to be consistent in your attitude, effort, and actions. Have a great attitude all the time so you can give your best in everything you do. Focus on becoming the best version of yourself every day. Don't change with the wind; instead, be like a strong-rooted tree that does not waver, regardless of what is happening around it. Be the kind of leader everyone knows they can trust and count on.

Be Consistent in Your Desire to Be Great

Mike Smith

The greatest players I have coached have a consistent desire to be great. I have had the privilege to work with some of the best coaches and players in the world. The best of the best always have this one trait: the desire to be great. Your desire is measured by your routine and preparation. Ray Lewis had a driving desire to be the greatest linebacker to ever play. His daily, weekly, and yearly preparation was so detailed. His commitment to this process was unmatched by any other player. He was all in. He did everything in his power to be as prepared as he possibly could be. He would leave no stone unturned. Ray raised the level of performance of everyone that he came in contact with in the organization.

Jack Del Rio was the same way as a player and coach. I worked on the same coaching staff with Jack in Baltimore and served as his defensive coordinator in Jacksonville. Jack was a very good player in the NFL before starting his coaching career. Some people described Jack as an overachiever as a player. He played for 11 years and was named to the Pro Bowl in 1994. Call it what you want, but I call it being successful and sustainable. We would often have discussions when we were on the staff with the Ravens about what were the players' mindsets at different times of the year. Knowing that would help with the planning of the schedule throughout the year. As the head coach of the Jaguars, Jack would share with the team the importance of setting and following a routine throughout the season. He talked about his routine as a player and gave suggestions on how to prepare yourself both physically and mentally for the grind of an NFL season. It was a framework that had worked well for him and other players in the league. He shared the importance of following the routine and being consistent in your preparation. Jack knew that if you wanted to be great, you had to have a consistent routine that prepared you to be great. It was a powerful message he shared with his team and one that I often shared with mine.

As a head coach one of my priorities was to make sure my teams maintained this same desire to be great. Unfortunately, I feel like I let our team and organization become somewhat complacent in 2013. We had this feeling that we would be successful no matter what we did, forgetting about all the little things it took us to be successful the previous years.

Complacency Is a Disease

Mike Smith

Every team and organization must guard against the disease of complacency. It can be very subtle in its early stages. In fact it can go almost unnoticed. It is imperative that the leader of the organization not allow the seeds of complacency to germinate within the team. If they do, complacency will multiply faster than the most invasive weed. You become complacent when team members start to believe that their prior successes are going to ensure that they will have success in the future. In the case of the 2013 Falcons team, we lost sight of how the other teams in the NFL were trying to displace us as one of the top teams of the previous five seasons. We stopped focusing on the process as a team and organization. We ended up the season with a 4-12 record, when we had finished the previous season hosting the NFC Championship game. This was inexcusable, and as the head coach I was responsible. The NFL is a no-excuses business. You cannot blame it on factors outside of your control (e.g., injuries, bad breaks, etc.). Instead of allowing the guys to think they were going to automatically get back to the playoffs, the NFC Championship game, and even the Super Bowl, I should have done what I had done in previous years: create more urgency, focus on our desire to be great, identify what we need to do to improve, and most importantly focus on the process, not the outcome.

The difference between winning and losing in the NFL is truly a matter of inches—five or six plays in every game. Most business environments are highly competitive as well. Complacency has led to the demise of many teams, organizations, and companies because they were not looking forward and instead rested on their laurels while their competitors were doing everything in their power to overtake them. At the end of each year, you must go through an extensive evaluation of the entire organization to identify what you did well and where you fell short of your expectations. The most important aspect of this exercise is to identify how you are going to make sure that you are going to innovate and improve in the future. When you focus on the process instead of the destination, you make your desire to be great your number-one priority, so you won't allow the disease of complacency to set in. Being consistently complacent is something you definitely don't want. What you do want is consistent improvement, consistent coaching, and a consistent desire to be great.

Consistently Improving

Jon Gordon

The lesson Mike just shared is critical. Even the best coaches and teams can make the mistake of focusing on the past instead of creating the future. Bill Walsh, one of the greatest football coaches of all time, would often say that he feared success—not failure. He worried that once a player or team had success they would become complacent and stop striving to get better. He saw it too many times. A team would win a championship or a player would have a great season and then they would think that all they had to do was step on the field and they would automatically achieve the same results the following year, not realizing that it is the hard work, passion, and constant and consistent improvement that results in success. Each year the best recommit themselves to being better than they were the year before. The fact is, past success does not determine future success. Future success is the result of how you work, prepare, and practice and how you strive to improve each day. It's a commitment that the best of the best make every week, every day, every hour, and every moment. You have to consistently improve if you want to win consistently.

Humble and Hungry

Jon Gordon

Two words that characterize a team that is always improving and growing are “humble” and “hungry.” Whether you are a team trying to become a winner or you have achieved the pinnacle of success, it's important to remember the following:

Be Humble

• Don't think you know it all. See yourself as a life-long learner who is always seeking ways to learn, grow, and improve.
• See everyone, including your competition, as teachers and learn from everyone.
• Be open to new ideas and strategies to take your work and team to the next level.
• When people tell you that you are great, don't let it go to your head. (And when they tell you that you stink, don't let it go to your head.)
• Live with humility because the minute you think you have arrived at the door of greatness it will get shut in your face.
• Remember that today's headlines are tomorrow's fish wrap.

Be Hungry

• Seek out new ideas, new strategies, and new ways to push yourself and your team out of your comfort zone.
• Be willing to pay the price that greatness requires. Don't be average. Strive to be great.
• Become the hardest working team you know.
• Love the process and you'll love what the process produces.
• Make your life and work a quest for excellence. Every day ask how can I be better today than I was yesterday?
• Don't rest on past laurels. Make your next work your best work.